Tuesday, October 6, 2015

By now it is or ought to be understood that couples
counseling is largely a waste of time. Of course, a lot of people still try to
repair their marriages by working with a couples therapist, and no one would
say that it never works.

But, if a treatment only works on very rare occasions we should
conclude that it does not work, that the benefits some people derive from it
are coming from somewhere else.

One suspects that business is not so good in the couples
counseling market so its practitioners have come up with a new idea. They
advise you to do a six month performance review for your marriage. If that lame
analogy were not enough, they have larded on another one; your performance
review will be like a six-month check-up at the dentist.

No kidding.

If couples counseling is dying out, it’s not only because it
does not work often enough to be worth the effort, but it’s also because its
theorists do not know how to think.

Getting
your annual performance review from your boss can be awkward and irritating.
Can you imagine getting one from your spouse?

A
growing number of marriage therapists and relationship researchers recommend
that spouses and romantic partners complete periodic performance reviews.
Couples typically wait too long to go to therapy for help, they say. By taking
time to regularly evaluate and review their relationship together, partners can
recognize what is and isn’t working—and identify goals for improvement—long
before problems become entrenched and irresolvable.

“It’s
the relationship equivalent of the six-month dental checkup,” says James
Cordova, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Couples
and Family Research at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass.

And you thought I was making it up.

Your performance review will be like having your teeth
cleaned. There, that will certainly persuade you to do it. And yet, who is the
dentist and who is the patient. Besides, when you are having your teeth cleaned
you cannot engage in very much conversation. Apparently, these therapists have
not thought through the implications of their analogies.

We find a similar flaw in the notion of performance review.
Which spouse is the boss or manager and which one is the employee. A
performance review involves a power imbalance. Do these therapists imagine that
couples will be role playing and reversing the roles? And, doesn’t a
performance review suggest the possibility of a promotion, a raise or a bonus?
What precisely is the nature of the exchange that a couple is supposed to
engage in? What are the concrete rewards and punishments?

The therapists note that each party needs to be careful and
constructive, which is certainly a good idea. The problem is, the exercise, as
defined, can easily lend itself to abuse. Once it becomes a regular exercise—like
a dental check-up—couples will need to spend some of their time trying to find
fault with each other. If they cannot find anything wrong with each other they are
not doing their jobs. Then, they will have to offer constructive criticism, as
the saying goes, but criticism is criticism, and telling your spouse that he or
she is failing to perform can make people self-conscious and withdrawn.

I probably do not need to say so, but within the context of
a marriage, the concept of performance does not really elicit thoughts of doing
a job. It elicits the image of successful or failed sexual performance. Have these great thinkers thought of this? I certainly hope that they have.

I would humbly suggest that a six month sexual performance
review is probably not going to improve anyone’s sex life. Discovering that
your spouse is unhappy with your sexual performance will probably make you both
more self-conscious about said performance… thus ruining the mood.

I am not saying that one party to a marriage might well be
unhappy with marital sex, but couples would do better to find another way to
communicate their wishes for more or less adventure and more or less frequency. In an age where
all things sexual are out in the open, couples should certainly be able to figure out how
to work on their sex lives without doing performance reviews.

Besides, I had thought that the great minds of the therapy
profession had long ago recognized that there is much more to sexual congress
than sexual congress. To focus on sex in performance terms is not likely to
address the issues that turn people on or off. Those would be issues regarding
character, trust, responsibility and reliability.

And if you are in the business of repairing modern
marriages, more of which fail than perhaps at any time in history, then you need
to have some awareness of the role that cultural warfare plays.

In our modern day and age couples bicker over the division
of household labor. And we know that some spouses are deeply resentful of the
role that seems to have devolved upon them. We also know that some spouses are
so deeply resentful of their roles that they withhold sex, as a way to persuade
their spouses to do more around the house. And some spouses express their
resentment by cheating.

As if that is not bad enough, sometimes performance reviews
can make one or the other member of the couple sound whiny. Professionals know
better than to argue, but they are so concerned about expressing their feelings
that they sound like whiny adolescents.

Bernstein tells about the performance reviews of one pair of
married couples therapists:

Kathlyn
and Gay Hendricks, relationship coaches and authors of multiple books
on marriage, who have been married 34 years and live in Ojai, Calif., schedule
informal discussions with each other every Tuesday and Thursday, where they
talk about problems or conflicts that have arisen in the past few days. In one
recent discussion, Mr. Hendricks told his wife he has been feeling “left out”
because she has been traveling so much for work lately, and she assured him
that her schedule was going to lighten up soon.

Do you really need a performance review to explain to your
spouse that you are not very happy that she is abandoning her home in favor of
her work? You would think that after 34 years of marriage the unhappy couple
had come to terms with travel schedules, without anyone’s having to express his
feelings like a child.

My doubts withstanding, some studies have found that these
performance reviews can help some people some of the time.

Bernstein reports:

Research
shows that regular checkups improve relationships. In a study published in
Sept., 2014, in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Dr. Cordova
and his colleagues gave 216 married couples questionnaires asking them to
assess the biggest strengths and weaknesses in their relationship. Half the
couples then saw a therapist for a checkup of two sessions to go over their
evaluations and brainstorm a plan to address their concerns. The other half
were told they were on a waiting list and didn’t discuss their assessments in a
checkup.

The
researchers, who followed up with the couples after one and two years, found
those who had performed the checkup saw significant improvements in their
relationship satisfaction, intimacy and feelings of acceptance by their
partner, as well as a decrease in depressive symptoms, compared with the
couples in the control group who didn’t perform a checkup. In addition, the
couples who had the most problems in their marriage before the checkup saw the
most improvement.

This sounds a little too good to be true. It’s a small
sampling and thus not likely to be very indicative. For all I know the couples
who were accepted felt that their marriages were being validated by the
researchers while the couples who were pawned off on a waiting list came to
believe that their marriages were beyond repair.

One needs to be careful with drawing conclusions from such a
study, however well-defined it appears.

Besides, Dr. Cordova does mention that some of the couples
who engage in these performance reviews end up arguing and bickering. When couples argue around the house they are likely to use couples therapy sessions to argue some more:

As for
the review itself, Dr. Cordova says you should always begin by identifying your
strengths as a couple. “It is the positive foundation that keeps a relationship
happy and healthy in the long run,” he says.

Then
move on to discussing your concerns—but limit yourself to one or two. “You
don’t want to kitchen-sink the thing,” Dr. Cordova says. And you don’t need to
come up with a solution right away. Aim to understand your partner and to have
your partner understand you.

If the
review makes your relationship worse, or causes a lot of arguing, you may need
relationship counseling. “If you are doing it well, you can tell because you
will feel closer to each other and will each feel understood,” Dr. Cordova
says.

Yes, indeed. It’s all about sharing feelings, emoting to
each other, whining and whinging to each other. Many marriages could well use
improvement, but forcing couples to therapy their marriages on a regular basis,
on the grounds that said marriages need performance reviews, is surely not the
answer.

How about some exercises in character building, in good
behavior on the part of each member of the couple? And how about a clearer
division of household labor, of the rules and roles that pertain in the
marriage? If you get all of that wrong, you can complain all you want, you can
empathize all you want and you can find your spouse’s performance lacking, but
you will not repair your marriage.

8 comments:

Oh oh what a mess. Is there any hope in constructive feedback in that minefield?

And given that most divorces are initiated by wives, husbands probably should be on the defensive, ready to look for signs of trouble.

Even so I agree this assertion might be marketing propaganda:"Dr. Cordova says while men often resist marriage therapy, they tend to appreciate marriage reviews, because they focus on a couple’s strengths and goals, as well as solving problems without blame."

Myself, whether or not a faciliator is used, I see value in a 6-month effort since that's long enough to set goals that need attention, and test your resolve (like new years resolutions), and short enough that unrealistic goals set at the last meeting can be refined or clarified. I'd even go for 3 month mid-reviews.

And this would seem to agree:Stuart: How about some exercises in character building, in good behavior on the part of each member of the couple? And how about a clearer division of household labor, of the rules and roles that pertain in the marriage?

Actually given money is the #1 conflict in marriages, even if nothing was discussed except money, it probably would save many couples. But perhaps this is so important it deserves its own meeting.

But the more subtle problems also worry me, long term bad habits that can corrode trust and safety, but its still hard for many people to say what's not working for them.

Some might be clearcut - like "I don't like it when you swear in front of the children," it would seem to be a concrete statement that can be verified, and ideally the "perpetrator" will accept the charge as true AND see why they shouldn't do that, and then make a commitment to improve. And when you make a promise to your spouse on changing behavior, you can also help them by asking for feedback when you regress to hold habits, right? OTOH, some behaviors will be less clearcut, and the best middle way less clear, like the clutter vs neatness predicament, when both can be right in degrees.

On the hardest side I recall articles like this:http://www.businessinsider.com/4-behaviors-can-predict-divorce-2015-1---------One recent study of 373 newlywed couples, for example, found that couples who yelled at each other, showed contempt for each other, or shut off conversation about an issue within the first year of marriage were more likely to divorce as far as 16 years down the road.

So what do these four "apocalyptic" behaviors actually look like in a relationship?1. Contempt2. Criticism3. Defensiveness4. Stonewalling---------

It is still hard to discuss, so such evaluations are almost better as self-evaluations. So disussion might start by each spouse evaluating their own vices, and saying what they'd like to work on, and as well might be surprised if self-criticism far exceeds imagined criticism by a spouse.

Anyway, I trust its hard, and there are skills in how to listen, without taking criticism personally, and how to move conflict back to needs. I'd probably go with Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication as a hopeful skillset, including empathy which Stuart dislikes, but perhaps there are skills in empathy that are different from empathy as we imagine it to be? I'm sure I imagine wrong more than not.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF6kMJxOpvI NonViolent Communication Marshall Rosenberg

I'm not married, but also not available, if that's what you're asking.

I am a follower of Erich Fromm who had lots of idea to consider. He talks about character too, maybe like Stuart.

https://archive.org/stream/TheArtOfLoving/43799393-The-Art-of-Loving-Erich-Fromm_djvu.txt---------------Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person ; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relate dness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object" of love.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. This is the same fallacy which we have already mentioned above.

Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object — and that everything goes by itself afterward.

This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to some- body else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."

Saying that love is an orientation which refers to all and not to one does not imply, however, the idea that there are no differences between various types of love, which depend on the kind of object which is loved. ---------------